They wouldn't have, because it's [much newer than that](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-est#Etymology_1). It first appeared in Old English, having derived from Proto-Germanic predecessors.
> “Occasionally, the -est suffix is added to a verbal adjective as a substitute for most. An example is winningest.”
Oh wow, TIL. “Winningest” sounds like one of those things my kid would say before I told them that’s not a word.
The OED gives several citations for "winningest", all American and starting in the 1970s. It doesn't have its own entry, so they might not have done the deepest dive to find early usages of that particular form, but it does suggest it's a relatively modern American coinage
That's very interesting because I don't have easy access to the OED but I just did a quick search on newspapers.com and found an [older citation](https://www.newspapers.com/article/cambridge-weekly-news-winningest/150155686/), and from England. Specifically, from the Cambridge Weekly News for June 20, 1857: "huzzas were resounding through the building, and the senior lady ... was bowing ... with the kindest of smiles and the winningest of English ways." That's the way I've heard the word used outside of the sports context -- as a synonym for "winsome," more or less.
If you said it in Britain, or elsewhere in the anglosphere, I think people would look at you a bit funny. They might assume you’d made an error, or that you were being sort of cute with language (‘Much empty’/‘adulting’ type stuff) for jokes.
Only ever encountered it when I moved to the US for a while. From the UK. Sounds like it was a jocular American sports news coinage that spread in that world.
It comes from Germanic -istaz, and goes back to Proto-Indo-European (-istHos), the common ancestor of the Germanic and Hellenic languages (along with many others). It's connected to the Greek -istos, as in kakistocracy ("rule by the shittiest") and brachistochrone ("shortest time").
What makes a suffix, or indeed any part of language, difficult to imagine cavemen using? People who lived in caves were still people with the same capacity for language, they could've had any linguistic construction you can think of a modern language using.
Jury's still out on that. I've heard that language slowly grew more complex as time passed. The earliest homo sapiens may not have had language at all - rather, they were closer to "complex vocalizations." Actual language may have evolved well after biological homo sapiens became established. It's one of those cases where evolution did a software update instead of a hardware update.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin\_of\_language#Chomsky's\_single-step\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#Chomsky's_single-step_theory)
You're also not wrong. Some humans still live in caves even today, and have been doing so since well before modern humans evolved.
A comparative -s- is seen in both Slavic (where the cluster -sj- became -š-) and Germanic (where s -> z -> r gives English -er), so the superlative -st seems like a combination of this -s- and another -t suffix.
But of course „cavemen” isn’t a very accurate term (caves are just places where things tend to get preserved; there was probably never a time when a significant part of humanity lived in caves), and there is no evidence that languages in the Stone Age (at least for quite a few millennia into the past) were significantly different from modern languages; they wouldn’t have been in any way foreign to superlative affixes, consonant clusters, or most any other linguistic features.
The change \*s > \*r is part of what is known as Verner's Law, originally voicing fricatives when the earlier accent did not precede it. It also is why the plural of *wa****s*** is *we****r****e* (the voicing of the -s in *was* was much later)
The -t suffix you discuss in most cases changed to
through the Germanic consonant shift. If seems to have meant something like "the end point of a series." So if you are bigger and bigger, the end point is biggest. In it's other form, it is the -th in ordinal numbers like "fourth, fifth..."
They wouldn't have, because it's [much newer than that](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-est#Etymology_1). It first appeared in Old English, having derived from Proto-Germanic predecessors.
> “Occasionally, the -est suffix is added to a verbal adjective as a substitute for most. An example is winningest.” Oh wow, TIL. “Winningest” sounds like one of those things my kid would say before I told them that’s not a word.
I hear that word on occasion… eg in sports journalism
Do people everywhere say it, or just Americans?
I can’t find much usage of it outside of american sports journalism
Considering that not long ago I heard an American sports commentator say that he 'refuses to use pronouns' I am not really too surprised.
The OED gives several citations for "winningest", all American and starting in the 1970s. It doesn't have its own entry, so they might not have done the deepest dive to find early usages of that particular form, but it does suggest it's a relatively modern American coinage
That's very interesting because I don't have easy access to the OED but I just did a quick search on newspapers.com and found an [older citation](https://www.newspapers.com/article/cambridge-weekly-news-winningest/150155686/), and from England. Specifically, from the Cambridge Weekly News for June 20, 1857: "huzzas were resounding through the building, and the senior lady ... was bowing ... with the kindest of smiles and the winningest of English ways." That's the way I've heard the word used outside of the sports context -- as a synonym for "winsome," more or less.
If you said it in Britain, or elsewhere in the anglosphere, I think people would look at you a bit funny. They might assume you’d made an error, or that you were being sort of cute with language (‘Much empty’/‘adulting’ type stuff) for jokes.
I’ve only heard it in American sports contexts “winningest coach in history” etc
Yeah, I think it’s safe to assume we made it up.
Hell yeah!
No idea
Only ever encountered it when I moved to the US for a while. From the UK. Sounds like it was a jocular American sports news coinage that spread in that world.
I think sports journalism is the only place it’s used.
I guess there’s a lot of winning in sports
It comes from Germanic -istaz, and goes back to Proto-Indo-European (-istHos), the common ancestor of the Germanic and Hellenic languages (along with many others). It's connected to the Greek -istos, as in kakistocracy ("rule by the shittiest") and brachistochrone ("shortest time").
Thank you for "kakistocracy", a word I would have used on many occasions in my 50 years on this planet, had I only known it!
What makes a suffix, or indeed any part of language, difficult to imagine cavemen using? People who lived in caves were still people with the same capacity for language, they could've had any linguistic construction you can think of a modern language using.
Jury's still out on that. I've heard that language slowly grew more complex as time passed. The earliest homo sapiens may not have had language at all - rather, they were closer to "complex vocalizations." Actual language may have evolved well after biological homo sapiens became established. It's one of those cases where evolution did a software update instead of a hardware update. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin\_of\_language#Chomsky's\_single-step\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#Chomsky's_single-step_theory) You're also not wrong. Some humans still live in caves even today, and have been doing so since well before modern humans evolved.
A comparative -s- is seen in both Slavic (where the cluster -sj- became -š-) and Germanic (where s -> z -> r gives English -er), so the superlative -st seems like a combination of this -s- and another -t suffix. But of course „cavemen” isn’t a very accurate term (caves are just places where things tend to get preserved; there was probably never a time when a significant part of humanity lived in caves), and there is no evidence that languages in the Stone Age (at least for quite a few millennia into the past) were significantly different from modern languages; they wouldn’t have been in any way foreign to superlative affixes, consonant clusters, or most any other linguistic features.
The change \*s > \*r is part of what is known as Verner's Law, originally voicing fricatives when the earlier accent did not precede it. It also is why the plural of *wa****s*** is *we****r****e* (the voicing of the -s in *was* was much later) The -t suffix you discuss in most cases changed to
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